[xep-support] Re: Question on Cover Page

[Kevin Brown]

> I want to avoid this. I've wasted far too much time already trying to make DocBook work.

That is nothing to do with Docbook. It is pure XSL FO.
You would, based on that solution, have no content on the page. A background-image inside of region-before does not constitute "content" on the page as running headers/footers occur for pages that have content.

If you only insert a header into a document and then render it (nothing in the flow). You would get just what you asked for ... nothing. A "blank" page would be collapsed. 

Given that, you could just create a page with no region-before, no region-after and a region-body with no margins. Then just insert your background-page in the flow as:

<block line-height="0"><external-graphic src="yourcover.pdf"/></block>

You need the line-height for that block set to "0" to ensure fit of the PDF.

Either of the above are done customizing fo/titlepage.templates.xml as described here:

http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/HTMLTitlePage.html

or here:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/ug-editorEclipse/tasks/docbook-pdf-output-customization.html

Even if you could convert you Word/ODT document to FO (and you haven’t looked hard because these things also exist), it would not help you (in fact in would be more difficult that the steps above) unless you plan to hand edit FO before sending to a formatting engine (sticking your custom FO inside another). You only need to edit the titlepage.template.xml in Docbook to remove all the content and replace it with your image. 

Kevin Brown
RenderX

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeffrey Walton [mailto:noloader at gmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, November 10, 2013 5:54 PM
To: Kevin Brown; RenderX Community Support List
Subject: Re: [xep-support] Re: Question on Cover Page

Thanks Kevin.

> Since you need to have some content on the page, juts place 
> <fo:block><fo:leader/></fo:block> in the flow of the page.
I want to avoid this. I've wasted far too much time already trying to make DocBook work.

I can provide an OpenOffice Writer file (ODT), Microsoft Word file (DOC ro DOCX), or the prebuilt PDF. Writer and Word do not output formatted objects (I already tried to find it).

Jeff

On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 1:11 PM, Kevin Brown <kevin at renderx.com> wrote:
> Most anything is possible.
>
> Your task is only to customize what you need to do in Docbook.
>
> You would use a one page, page sequence and on that page put the PDF 
> as the background-image on the region-before, set the extent of the 
> region-before equal to the page height.
>
> Since you need to have some content on the page, juts place 
> <fo:block><fo:leader/></fo:block> in the flow of the page.
>
> Use initial-page-number="1" and no-force for the page count on the 
> following page sequence that is your content.
>
> Kevin Brown
> RenderX
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xep-support-bounces at renderx.com
> [mailto:xep-support-bounces at renderx.com] On Behalf Of Jeffrey Walton
> Sent: Saturday, November 09, 2013 7:49 PM
> To: RenderX Community Support List
> Subject: [xep-support] Question on Cover Page
>
> I'm probably grasping at straws for this one, but it never hurts to ask.
>
> I have a one page PDF that I would like to use as a cover page for my 
> document. It was created in OpenOffice's Writer, and it has the 
> title/subtitle in the fonts I want and it has the logo.
>
> I found there are numbering problems in the document if I use `pdftk` 
> to replace the cover page after the book is built. With pdftk, the 
> cover page starts numbering at '1' rather than 'i', so the first 
> content page is 6 rather than 1.
>
> Is it possible to instruct XEP to use my cover page in place of the 
> DocBook stuff (specifically, the recto page)?
>
> Thanks in advance.